Friday, 10 February 2012 – Durban, South Africa
Adventures on the transit to and from the game park
Elephants poop every 10 minutes. That's what the two Afrikaans woman guides both mentioned during the one and a half hour bus trip north from Richards Bay for our game park visit yesterday morning. We were retracing our route of the day earlier from Richards Bay to the St. Lucia and going a bit closer to the Mozambique border to reach the one hundred plus hectare wild life reserve. At one twentieth the size of the much more famous Kruger Park, Hluhluwe-Umfolozi is still very big although it's a lot harder to pronounce.
Besides the interesting fact about elephants (which was oddly enough was actually part an homage to the dung beetle, without which all of South Africa would be deeply buried in elephant dung both guides intoned), the two days of white Afrikaans guides' talks included an equal mixture of hard to confirm botanical, mining, aquatic, and historical information plus a huge helping of equally patronizing and degrading but unverifiable information about the Zulu's, now the predominate political and economic group in South Africa. We heard everything from the Zulu's "self destructive odd beliefs" which actually seemed a lot more reasonable to me than those of the 20% minority of the population who put the 80% in essentially concentration camps for 30 plus years, but who's counting. The tour company guides, all white of Afrikaans background, seemed to mention repeatedly that the Apartheid policies "were dreadful". I think they wanted us tourists to believe that Apartheid was devised and supported by perhaps space aliens or some weird spell was cast on the leaders that THEY elected. For all it's worth, the small towns we passed on our ride were clean, the people we saw were well dressed and seemed pretty happy, and the African (i.e. Zulu) wildlife guides and docents we encountered were educated, articulate, perhaps more sophisticated than the Afrikaans but certainly extremely competent. The modern black Africans did not seem to need to discuss backward looking revisionist history. They are the present and the future in this mineral rich and potentially economically powerful essentially democratic country.
While I'm on culture, I would like to organize a few kilobytes to do a short "Lost at Sea" digression. My friend and cruise travel agent, Jim, mentioned to me (i.e. warned me) that there would be a large proportion of Europeans (i.e. German speaking people) on the Cape Town to Cape Town segment of this cruise. He didn't mention that these folks would be, 1) older than us, and 2) needing to work on their "works and plays well with others" skills. This has not really been much of a problem except for having scowls returned to our greetings and being essentially ignored except for those times, any times actually, when buses were involved. Buses? Well, it seems that whenever on this cruise segment a tour or shuttle bus was to be loaded, these otherwise slow moving folks would elbow the demure second largest group of English folks to the back of the bus and the definite in the minority Americans completely out of the way—even to the point of knocking some of us down, really—to occupy the front half of each vehicle, especially all the rows without window partitions or any other obstruction. They also shouted in German to each other over any non-German speaker who might occupy the intervening but less desirable rows. I was just raced to the shuttle bus back from downtown Durban to the pier by an elderly German woman who finally pushed me out of the way to put her hat on the "best" front seat of the bus in order to save it for her husband. He was late getting on the bus as he was probably pushing some unsuspecting elderly English woman into the luggage bins under the coach.
The above might not be blog worthy in reporting this exceptionally fantastic cruise except for yesterday's extraordinary incident. Apparently a consequence of the decline of the Afrikaans run tour company has been much deferred maintenance of their tour buses. The same tour company has been running the ship's tours in each South African port with the same buses which are shuttled overnight from Durban to Port Elizabeth, Richards Bay, etc. I failed to report that in Port Elizabeth last week, the bus Barbara and I were in was obliged to stop so as to pick up the guests from the other bus on the same tour. That bus had experienced an a/c failure. So the others packed in our bus for the hour ride back to port from the tour of the Addo Elephant Park. Our bus became very crowded, but it seemed a relatively normal occurrence that was dealt with routinely.
I gave no thought of that incident until yesterday morning at Richards Bay when our all day tour to the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve was delayed 20 minutes or so as it was rediscovered that one of the buses had no air conditioning and another bus had to be brought in as a substitute. Unfortunately, the substitute bus was a five seat across local long-distant bus, not a tour bus. It was crowded, as the Germans seemed to have left only the very narrow twofers on the left for us English speaking folks as each of them spread a couple each on the three seat side, leaving the middle seat empty. The 66 passenger bus essentially replaced two 55 passenger buses as now the total bus complement was down by one and all of us were forced to ride in this larger but uncomfortable vehicle.
The 1 ½ hour ride to the Park and back was otherwise uneventful. The ride back—after 5 hours of touring in open vehicles —was a bit more uncomfortable than the ride out as the a/c stopped working effectively on this replacement bus most of the way back. No problem really, as we were pretty tired and we had had a super tour, until we arrived back at the pier. When we pulled up to the ship, the bus' door—the only door on this bus—did not open. We were trapped inside. The ship's escort, one of the members of the entertainment troupe, appealed to the ship's tour manager. He proceeded to stand outside the bus looking like a scared bunny, a more extreme version of his usual look actually. Here were 50 or so of us now very tired and hungry. The electric operated lock was frozen closed. The bus driver summoned up his skills which consisted of constantly trying the "door open" button repeatedly. It was encouraging to hear the usual sound of the pneumatics, but of course the door did not open. We were trapped in a 100 degree bus with 35 assertive Germans and 20 or so of us others.
The Germans appeared to believe that hollering (through us) at each other was a viable solution. The English got all the more quiet, and the few Americans mostly tried to keep out of the way. One of us, actually me, suggested that a crow bar might be a good solution. Actually after about 20 minutes of prying, the driver hitting the open door button at least fifty more times without avail, and some banging of the luggage compartment—it opened and closed just fine—the door was finally deformed enough for us to escape. Although Barbara and I were in the fourth row (by the post that blocked the view), we were the 20th or so off the bus as our Teutonic fellows had somehow managed to get ahead.
The evening proceed routinely after that. After a shower and change of clothes, the martinis (shaken, not stirred) tasted particularly good. So did the scallops and my dairy free chocolate mousse filled chocolate crepes.
The Game Park safari
I visited this same game park from Silver Shadow's visit to Richards Bay in March, 2001. This park boasts the "Big 5", that is the animals that can really hurt you. It is not really possible to see lions and the other big cats during a day time visit, but despite its large size the park's hills and fairly open terrain allow the guides to find rhinos, giraffes, elephants, various antelope types, and wonderful groups of zebras—everyone's favorite except for giraffes. Oddly enough, the striped and long necked animals seem to hang around the same clearings. So one doesn't need to pick and choose.
We had a very nice buffet lunch at Hilltops, the same place where I stopped for lunch in 2001 and had my picture taken with some begging zebras. This time my picture was made with Barbara at essentially the same spot. Also this time we booked a full five hours of wildlife viewing rather than only the half day of my previous visit and covered over 35 miles of back roads within the Reserve. Except for the (now) normal orchestration of the order of the sightings by the Disney choreographed guides, this was a fitting third wildlife experience on this cruise here in South Africa. And the high cost of the full day excursion may be whole or partially refunded due to one of the guests politely explaining to the Hotel Director last evening about the potential safety issues of a locked bus in an accident. (I was particularly articulate after that martini.)
We took the shuttle bus into Durban this morning and returned in time for lunch as the summer rain began. This is a good afternoon for a nap. On to East London tomorrow and perhaps a shuttle ride into town for rechargeable batteries. Always good to have a quest to go on. Photos from full day game park visit will be posted shortly.
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